Regulatory Agenda

October 19, 2018

Immediately after President Trump’s Inauguration the Administration, Congressional Leaders and the business community worked together to begin the process of rolling back the aggressive regulatory agenda of the Obama Administration. Some Obama Executive Orders were quickly reversed by Trump Executive Orders, some rules were reversed by an agency, and some were unraveled by withdrawing the government from ongoing litigation.

Significantly, rules were also reversed legislatively using the Congressional Review Act (CRA). The CRA was enacted in 1996 to allow Congress to repeal rules issued by a president late in his/her term. Prior to 2017, the CRA had been successfully used only once; last year Congress and President Trump repealed 14 rules using the CRA.

The regulatory reform effort has been successful by any measure. In October, 2017, Investor’s Business Daily reported on a study by the Competitive Enterprise Institute showing that:

Trump ends the fiscal year as America’s least-regulatory president since Reagan. It’s no exaggeration. The Federal Register, the bible of federal rules, peaked at record high 97,110 pages under President Obama in 2016. Today, under President Trump, it stands at 45,678 pages.

Even more notable, on January 5th this year American Action Forum (AAF) published a comprehensive report entitled “2017: THE YEAR IN REGULATION.” AAF reported that 274 regulations were finalized in 2017 with an economic cost of $30.6 billion, but that:

81 percent of all regulatory costs finalized in 2017 came during President Obama’s final weeks in office. . . Of the $30.6 billion in finalized costs last year, $24.8 billion came from 38 rules published from January 3-19, 2017, in the waning days of the Obama Administration . . . [T]he imposition of just $5.8 billion in new regulatory costs in nearly a year is a considerable feat for the Trump Administration.

This success story should have merited press coverage, especially since the business-friendly regulatory climate almost certainly contributed to economic growth and the record-breaking stock market. But the story has gone mostly untold, with one notable exception.

Politico took note in a May, 2017, story headlined: “Inside Trump’s war on regulations . . . The push to block, rewrite and delay scores of Obama-era rules may be the administration’s biggest untold success.” They wrote that:

The chaos of President Donald Trump’s first four months as president has overshadowed a series of actions that could reshape American life for decades — efforts to rewrite or wipe out regulations affecting everything from student loans and restaurant menus to internet privacy, workplace injuries and climate change.

But Trump is going after even bigger targets, setting bureaucratic wheels in motion that could eventually ax or revise hundreds of regulations as agencies reorient themselves toward unwinding red tape and granting speedier approvals to projects. If successful, these efforts could represent the most far-reaching rollback of federal regulations since Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

While the pace of de-regulation slowed somewhat from the major initial push for reform last year, the departments and agencies continue to advance welcome changes to the regulatory agenda. For example, on October 17th the Office of Management and Budget announced that:

In the same period, the Trump Administration eliminated 12 regulations for every 1 new significant regulation passed. By contrast, the Obama Administration imposed a net $245 billion in regulatory costs during the same time period. In the last year, the Trump Administration eliminated 176 outdated, unnecessary, or duplicative regulatory actions.

Since President Trump took office, the Administration has provided $33 billion in net regulatory savings.